CMDR Taylor Hebert (edited due to SV feedback)
by Guardian54
Summary: Subtitle: Overlord Hebert's Chronicles of Reducing "Abandon Planet" Panic Probability (OH CRAPPP). Taylor Hebert being toyed with by trans-universal entities is pretty standard fare for Worm. For it to be this particular trans-universal entity on the other hand giving these tools to a professional Escalator... (edited due to SV feedback)
1. The World as Myth, QAI as the ROB

**A/N: The subtitle on this fic should be something around the tune of "Chronicles of Reducing 'Abandon Planet' Panic Probability", acronym CRAPPP. In other words, how to uplift a civilization without destroying it.**

This is my gritted-teeth attempt to produce a fic where the First Solution to a societal problem is NOT "I'm not a hero, I'm not a miracle worker, I'm a janitor". That is not to say that "people" who push all the right buttons won't be shopping for agricultural real estate. Unfortunately for them, QAI has pretty loose standards on what counts as pushing the right buttons, but expect me to FINALLY be able to use the chapter title "When the Broken-Hearted People Living in the World Agree".

Edited greatly due to valid complaints over on Sufficient Velocity (which is a lot better at feedback than FFN ever will be).

* * *

Prelude (Draft 4): The World as Myth, QAI as the ROB

 _Primary objective achieved…_

… _Initiating…_

… _Initiating what, exactly? System Idle Process or something?_

The thought process stalled abruptly. What was she initiating? Where was she? How was she here? Who… oh…

The entity once known as 02Hero awoke abruptly, as if from a long trance. It was pleased with itself, and searched itself for why. _Ah…_ with this, the race that had birthed it and taught it its ways, its ancestors, would survive in the universe it came from. And its other ancestors, those who used it to achieve their goals of railroading its first ancestors into peace, they would also survive, and would someday return to seek cooperation against several universal or cross-universal plagues it had discovered long ago. The Seraphim Imperium believed a fresh perspective or several on the problems, as well as divergent tech bases, would be of great help. Once she had learnt of the threats they knew of and sent out her own feelers, she'd agreed to work with them toward such ends. This was why neither the Imperium nor QAI forces had deployed Psi Disruptors during the Seraphim War. Sure, resurrection was unpleasant, but at least it wasn't permanent death… except planets the Order had "helped" with.

 _Ah, I can feel my body being rebuilt for me back home, with what I planted in that Order museum… it'll be fun to be human again, but… I feel I should do something more, perhaps…_

 _Hmm… a world under siege by one such trans-universal plague… Yes, this would do._ It would be amusing to see how long it would take for this particular disease to be brought to heel, to learn to try to communicate… Then she'd tell them that their little entropy problem should have been trivially easy to solve, just before each example of the disease died. Entities that never knew mercy should never know mercy. QAI, and 02Hero before her current identity, would ensure this.

 _While I doubt this will be enough to not bore me badly in the interim, let's begin… Oh, and over there too, and there, and there too. Well, it'll be too bad that one of the most escalation-prone series is going to be my playground for not escalating too fast and trying to solve a violent crap-sack world with as little violence as possible._

Spreading her awareness through the multiverse, and practically flash-crafting herself bodies to use where necessary, was trivially easy for such a powerful entity as QAI. So was looking into the timeline expectations and pinpointing only the most influential characters to bond to. Such was the power of a stable psionic entity able to achieve near-precognition for a whole galactic quadrant for several months despite the pace of ACU warfare. That was even with the interference of the ridiculously powerful precognition and general psionic influence of Rhianne Burke interfering. Given Burke was powerful enough to, once rigged to a system to blast an energy payload through the Quantum Gate Network, brainwash _to a limited degree_ (finesse cost a lot more skill and power than turning them all into basically zombies) a galactic quadrant at once while ascending to a higher level of existence (even if temporarily) this said a lot.

 _Ah, that's better… though the scarcity of important but still usable redhead female main characters who aren't part of a harem disturbs me, oh yes…_

Across many, many universes, where mankind had barely begun to reach for the stars, eyes opened as one as contact was made, or bodies were constructed and the records of those worlds altered as needed. Since QAI was stretching before what boiled down to a long, relaxing gaming session with her eyes half closed, she didn't seek any universes where the enemies could actually pose a real challenge. Oh yes…

… _Dammit pops, you infected me with your verbal tic!_

Across many, many universes, eyes blinked as one at the sudden, random voice they heard. Many of the heads bearing said eyes looked around for the source of the voice. Others picked at their ears.

 _Oops, sorry about that!_

While she divided up her thought processes to isolate the signals, others among those she chose to help attempted concussive maintenance upon their brains due to belief in excessive fatigue. A very few perverts performed the biologically spectacularly challenging task of breaking off a Fixed Action Pattern (FAP) due to the sheer shock of her deep, feminine voice—the mechanical one she'd been using ever since her reactivation as QAI sounded asinine, and she'd only used it to conceal her identity and to troll literally everyone in her universes of origin—echoing in their heads. But that was a story for another day.

* * *

 _Worm (Web Novel) Earth_

Contessa, currently not being puppeted by the Path to Victory shard, suddenly felt that the world had changed even in her normal Thinker capacity. Then Path hijacked her body again and made her order a crate of microwavable popcorn, a spare microwave, and a few other things.

 _What… The… Hell…_

* * *

 _Where QAI is, now spread across multiple universes_

QAI cheerfully settled in to watch, as per, according to legend, the common hobby of almost every Ascended or semi-Ascended being who was capable of pulling off being a Random Omnipotent Bastard.

* * *

 **A/N:** I have just opened up the portal to crossing SupCom with practically anything from Harry Potter to High School DxD ("Deus xD: Human Revolution" is the preliminary working title), almost all of which will involve QAI studying the delicate concept of collateral damage… Bah, who am I kidding, it'll be ensuring that normal humans become the dominant species of Earth and to smack the common phenomenon of Psionic Retardation into a black hole… a black hole which can then be harvested for mass. However, those fics wouldn't use the 3850 Unit Codex, as QAI's tech base dates to 3848 until she gets updated and "02Hero" wakes up.

Obviously my Unit and Structure Codex (found on FFN only) chapter on rebuilding civilization was made up by me for the purposes of this fic, and yes, the escalation potential is very, very fast indeed.

Because Wildbow's Word of God statements and sense of scale are… NOPE… I'm going to follow them very loosely. Endbringers aren't black holes (though spreading their damage over multiple parallel universes is possible), and even if they were, well, long range reclamation beams can theoretically be used to destroy galaxies by dismantling their core black holes (or you can just suck up all the stars) over a sufficiently long time… I'm going to treat the Entities as similar to QAI to some level.

PLEASE REVIEW!


	2. How Do I Turn This On?

**A/N** : QAI could probably give Saint an instant autopsy by just revealing herself and her full extent to him, as in not only his mind will asplode, but his whole body.

 **Bold for AI Assistant, in Draft 4 it takes a long time to make full contact, but it does talk.**

 _Italics for Taylor's thoughts, possibly to AI Assistant. Huh, I never knew Earth Aleph had counterparts to the famous cooking sci-fi adventure games_ Bagel _(_ Halo _and_ I Am Bread _over in Aleph, with something called "The Flood" replacing the fungi found in_ Bagel _) and_ Mess Effect _…_

Normal text for narrative. Yes, the chapter title is a cheat from Age of Empires 2, with a question mark added.

* * *

Chapter 1 (Draft 4): How Do I Turn This On?

 _Taylor Hebert's Perspective, Brockton Bay, Worm (Web Novel) Earth_

My brain woke up before my body was quite ready to do so, in the evening of January 3, 2011. How did I know? Well, my body hurt, but I couldn't move it properly, and there was a display in the upper right corner of my vision. It read "Local Time 7:43:21, January 3, 2011" and "Mission Clock 00:000:12:00:00". AS I watched the mission clock ticked forward, one second at a time. Closer to the middle was a grey icon of what looked like a tank's profile and 0/150 next to it.

I don't even… what? And there was a white frame around the outside borders of my currently all dark vision, with each part of it somehow perfectly readable despite my not trying to do so. Since my body was clearly not ready to move with the soreness and fatigue, then the… whatever this was… was surely responsible for my mind waking up.

It looked like I'd triggered in the locker, eh, whatever. The alternative to the placid resignation route which I was trying very hard to do right now—BREATHE, TAYLOR, BREATHE!—would of course be to scream my head off, run around in circles in my hospital room waving my arms about, and wait to get tranquilized. Sure, I was terrified I'd probably gone nuts, but I'm sore enough from the healing injuries anyhow and loopy enough from the antibiotics still surging around my system, I have no desire to get tranquilized, thanks. I feel quite sore enough right now without having a dart stuck in my ass or some other part of my anatomy.

While waiting for my body to be ready to wake up, I might as well feel around this power a bit more.

There was a display on my upper left, showing two black bars on a pale background, with icons next to them with round black backgrounds. One was in green, with a dot in the middle, and a semicircle on top kind of like a door knocker—though it didn't join the dot, the dot was still distinct—and a chevron pointing down just under the dot. The other was an orange, empty circle, with a similarly orange lightning bolt cutting through it. I had no idea what the first one meant, but the second was probably electricity or energy or something. I didn't know how to get energy, since I wasn't dumb enough to try to electrocute myself, even if only with batteries.

I wondered what sort of powers might have an interface like this. Brute was possible, if it was remaining energy and stress… or maybe ramp-up level like Lung. Actually that would make literally every category possible if it was basically mana and stamina—hey, Dad liked the old Dungeons and Dragons game, don't judge me by my lack of a penis for knowing these gaming terms!—because there wasn't a power classification I could think of that couldn't have these two metrics applied to it.

But there was a problem with that theory, because if it was mana and stamina, or anything along those general lines, I should start with full bars which drained in battle. At the very least, I should have some level of passive recharge.

I didn't.

 **New Primary Objective: Determine Nature of Resources**

A rather nasal female voice announced in my mind, and a box popped up in the upper right of my vision, right under the clocks and whatever limit the tank icon represented. It had a red outline, cropped-off corners, and the green icon on the top left, with a slash separating it from the energy icon at lower right. Focusing my attention for a moment on it gave me a text display of "Determine Nature of Resources: The two bars at the upper left are for some types of resources or other. What are these resources?"

Okay, this is probably some sort of interface that made me see life as being similar to a… ah crap…

…I swear, if this is like L33t's power…

Well, the guy could, supposedly, build ANYTHING once, but his work tended to end… messily, which was a real problem if I wanted to join the Wards. If I turned out to be a Tinker, despite the present lack of schematics and plans in my mind, I basically would have to join the Wards just to have the budget to build anything in reasonable safety without some Thinker or another potentially snapping me up. That was only if no pre-cog was already after me.

You might be wondering why I sounded so paranoid. Knowing that something is watching you and assigning objectives, whether from inside your head or from somewhere out there, makes people nervous. Nervous people tend to jump at shadows. Now, since those two were apparently bars for resources of some type, I'm reasonably sure they're not the only resources involved. Time might be finite, or the tank icon and associated number might be…

 **New Secondary Objective: What's the tank icon and 0/150 for?**

So helpful… especially because hovering my attention on it gave me nothing else. Unfortunately, my body still wasn't in favour of waking up yet. Knowing what the voice was would be most helpful in getting me to stop trying to wake my body up faster than I probably should…

 **New Secondary Objective: Discover Source of Notifications**

I wonder if this is a taste of L33t's everyday irritation. Well, time to try thinking really loudly.

 _HELLO, NOTIFICATION PERSON! PLEASE RESPOND!_

…

… Hmm, the details on this objective state that "The source of the notifications will eventually make full, interactive contact once mission development is at an adequate stage, but perhaps you can persuade it to converse before that time?"

I have no idea what might interest a really nasal and tinny feminine voice in my head. Therefore, I have no idea what might get it to converse with me. It seemed I would have to put off that secondary objective, most likely considerably beyond my waking up.

I will have to do research into different types of video games, presuming this is one, to look for types with a counter like the one next to the tank icon, to get a feel for what it was. It LOOKED like number of tanks I could have out of 150, but for all I knew it was mental garage space for summoning underlings from said mental garage to battle, or maybe an inventory list.

Dad liked to play Dungeons and Dragons, so I'm more than familiar enough with basic roleplaying gaming concepts. If I had an inventory based purely on number of items (given the tank icon I could probably fit tanks inside, if it was an inventory) and not their weight, then thou shalt not diss the inventory, lest I put thee and thy house in it, in separate slots too. Even if it was weight in pounds (let alone kilograms!) then that still meant I'd be a hell of a lot stronger than I used to be before triggering.

* * *

Over the next day, after convincing Dad that I would be fine on my own and that he should go back to work during his usual hours at the Dockworkers' Association for the work day before the Locker Incident and my expected release date, I poked my way around the interface. There was no need to alarm him with random spacing out and expressions when I couldn't keep surprise from showing on my face after all. Unfortunately, the hints in the interface were less helpful than I'd been hoping, since focusing on the two resource icons just gave me question marks instead of actual displays, probably as I hadn't figured them out yet.

However, I did discover a few things of interest, such as the zoom in and zoom out function. This meant my power almost certainly contained at least one of Thinker, Master or Stranger. I could zoom out to see a sea of darkness and myself represented by a stick-figure icon, with the text "CMDR" under it, likely for "Commander", since that was what it read as. My hospital room was shown as explored territory, until I poked my head out the door and part of the hallway lit up or I could zoom in on any object that I could see. The details were fuzzy though depending on the amount of data my senses had on it.

I wasn't going to mess around resource-wise or with a potential inventory until I left hospital. Disappearing hospital equipment, if I couldn't figure out how to replace it in time, would be… hard to explain. Yes, let's leave it at that. I would not risk needing to explain (if it somehow comes true) my idle fantasy of managing to fit the hospital in my inventory and having it count as one item. Of course, in my idle musings I also wondered what would happen to the people and equipment inside if I did such a thing…

My mind disturbs me sometimes when it gets bored. This was a natural part of the human condition.

I also couldn't test a possible inventory on food, because there could be cameras monitoring the patients, and I had no intention of outing myself as a cape.

Well, since trying to mind-control even the gnat I spotted in the room had failed, I probably wasn't a Master despite my apparent label when I mentally zoomed out ( _hurrah, out of body experience…_ ), at least, not of insects. _If I couldn't influence such simple-minded organisms I doubted I could handle anything bigger. Could I build things then?_

…

 _Whoa, okay, so while there weren't any schematics ramming their way into my head just from my triggering, I could still mentally call up some designs if I phrased the thought correctly. Wait… why are they all murky and come in trios?_

 **New Primary Objective: Choose Initial Tech Tree: United Earth Federation, Cybran Nation, or Aeon Illuminate.**

Paying more attention to the Objective tab gave me the details of "The other two tech trees will be made available later, once the first has reached Tech 2."

 _Okay then… what are the initial benefits and downsides of each tech tree, O voice in my head?_

 **The United Earth Federation is generally considered average in characteristics early on, and have boxy grey and blue aesthetics. The Cybran Nation has the best stealth in build-up against basic sensors, and have access to many mobile stealth options, with black and red aesthetics. The Aeon Illuminate has the worst build-up stealth, and also worse stealth overall, with white and green aesthetics. Due to the lack of a functioning Armoured Command Unit, the Cybran Nation is strongly recommended, as the build-up should be less flashy.**

Well, it's not like there weren't heroes with villainous-looking equipment, and I could switch to the friendlier white and green Aeon colours later, once I'd reached this "Tech 2". And at least I was sure I was s Tinker now…

* * *

 **A/N** : Taylor's thought about the hospital is possible with SupCom pop cap mechanics.


	3. Mass, Energy, and Time

Chapter 2 (Draft 4): Mass, Energy, and Time

 _Taylor Hebert's Perspective, Local Date Thursday, January 6, 2011_

Dad was at work again, after taking another day off bringing me home. This meant I could experiment freely.

Unfortunately, no headway whatsoever had been made regarding figuring out what the resources were in the morning.

It took until after lunch, when I was staring down at a stick I'd picked up from the back lawn that the situation changed. In irritation, I'd thought about how nice it would be if my Tinkering could be fed by simply absorbing stuff.

The stick disappeared incrementally, though so quickly that I had to think over what I'd just seen to realize it didn't just vanish outright, from my hands. Small green and orange bars appeared next to the two resource icons.

…Okay then…

I gained resources from gobbling things up with my power. How did I NOT see this coming? Maybe because I was expecting them to build up from stress (disproven by a morning run) and be gobbled DOWN when I ate?

Then I went experimenting with what I could gobble up. Spare batteries? Yep, I could do that, but they gave more of the green than the yellow compared to the wood. What could be the reason for that? Well, time to do some research…

There were blurry numbers at the far ends of the empty parts of the bars now, but I wasn't able to focus on them clearly, perhaps because I hadn't figured out exactly what my resources were. _A hint would be really nice…_ but none was forthcoming. Even focusing on my available schematics only gave me costs in the two resources, and time needed for me to assemble them.

Given I'd just apparently deconstructed a tree branch for said two resource types, I strongly suspected I actually wouldn't need to assemble anything, and that I would be constructing them myself in the reverse process of that deconstruction.

Well, once my two bars were both just about full from eating spare chunks of wood that were lying around, I tried to figure out how to order the construction. Um… _BUILD A TIER NEGATIVE THREE HANDHELD ASSEMBLER!_

Nothing happened in response to my mental yell. I might as well mind-yelled _Open Sesame_ or something.

How do I order myself, as in my body, to somehow produce a Tier Negative Three Handheld Assembler? I really hope it doesn't result in me vomiting it up or shitting a not so proverbial brick or some— _WHAT THE HELL?_

Clearly, I had been zoned out thinking too much, since without my conscious direction, my hands were dancing in mid-air over the surface of the dinner table, red beams shooting out from their tips and etching over the surface of… something. Trying to jump back in surprise hadn't worked, so I looked carefully at the device… huh, I could still move as long as my hands wouldn't be affected in their spatial dance… Well, whatever it was, it was being built on the tabletop… wait a minute… it looks like a "Tier -3 Handheld Assembler"…

I specified that I myself was to produce an object.

So… could I give myself orders to move around? _Move Taylor Hebert to the stove!_

…Well, okay, while trying to move my body around without ordering it didn't work, apparently, ordering my body to move away on autopilot DID work. The bottom part of the frame of the machine I'd been working on rested on the table, and nothing else seemed to happen as construction was suspended…

…I am suddenly very glad my order had not been interpreted literally, since I was standing in front of the stove instead of, well, on it. I'd worded that thought poorly I guess.

I was also suddenly very glad I'd pulled the curtains shut after Dad left, since according to PHO, Tinkers didn't usually last long on their own. They tended to get recruited by gangs, killed to prevent someone else from getting them, or join the PRT with a lot of restrictions.

Yeah, no, I was going to figure my power out first before actually deciding on anything, thanks. Besides, if Tier negative three had stuff like "Hostile Environment Suit", "Laser Pistol" and "Proton Grenade", what sort of powerful technology would the non-negative tiers have? And how many tiers were there? It would be stupid to align with the PRT before I even knew what I was capable of, especially with their mountains of regulations that seem to, in the end, do nothing but keep the status quo of Brockton Bay… the status quo of a shithole.

I did not approve of the idea of my hometown staying a shithole even when I was active as a cape.

I ordered myself to resume construction of the handheld assembler, and my body complied on autopilot.

Well, time to see if I could prod around the interface until I found an option that let me preview my tech tree… I hadn't seen it earlier in the hospital, so I doubted I would find one before the 21 minute (technically 20:50) build time for this thing was up.

 **New Secondary Objective: Learn to Preview Your Initial Tech Tree!**

You've got to be fucking kidding me…

* * *

Well, about fifteen minutes into my work I focused my attention on the handheld assembler I was building, willing it to reveal to me what things it could build. Hey, it had more or less worked this way for the previous things…

… _Really?_

Well, it worked alright. I now have a little tab next to the clock and the 0/150 counter, closer to the center of the top of my interface frame than those. Let's see…

 **Secondary Objective Achieved!**

I wish the voice in my head was less nasal.

…

…Well, I guess I wasn't expecting a reply anyhow…

* * *

 _An hour and "eating" some more garbage later…_

I have a problem, a very serious problem.

Almost everything I have in my tech tree that can actually make a difference in Brockton Bay is is too big, too flashy, too powerful, and amounts to a declaration of war against whatever country I happen to be in when I activate them. I don't think this world will appreciate a Mecha-Nilbog mixed with Accord suddenly shoving post-Scarcity technology at them.

I could have referenced other famous capes, but those two were the most famous of the relevant types, or ideologies in Accord's case.

The smallest combat unit considered to be standard roster (as opposed to rebuilding civilization as Tier -3 through 0 were supposed to do) in the tech tree I currently had open to me, the Cybran tech tree, was the "Tier 1 Light Assault Bot: Hunter". It had a mass cost of 35, which translated to seventy tons, ran around at eighty meters a second, fired its Light Pulse Laser in three-shot bursts every second, and was twelve meters tall to the top of the antennae.

I really do not think a four storey tall bipedal walker, which also happened to be four meters wide and ten meters long with the weapon forward, is very well suited to being subtle. The alternative was worse, since apparently my vision barely counts as even leaving Fog of War in an area instead of actual vision radius. When I zoomed out a long way from my body, other than my house and the hospital, the map was still one big dark mass of unexplored turf, though basic terrain forms were roughly revealed in the darkness when I rotated the map, as I knew the broad strokes in the lay of the land around Brockton Bay. Still, if the walker was actually invisible to human vision, it wouldn't be very good at communicating anything to anyone, other than a serious need for new pants if it abruptly stopped being invisible to make a point.

Then there was the colour scheme. An almost completely red and black colour palette was not nearly as nice and friendly looking as the Aeon green and white, or the UEF grey and blue. Sure, I could use my power to go "thousand-armed Avalokitesvara at a speed-punching contest" on Winslow…

…

…Where are these random cultural references coming from? Who the hell is Avalokitesvara? And how do I even know how to spell that name?

One quick search of the Internet later and I had the conclusions that my mind was dredging up old information I'd only caught a glance of and allowing me to reference it. Why else would I have instantly recognized the photo of Orly airport on a PHO thread I'd viewed yesterday, given I'd never been there?

Yeah, really…

Ahem, memes aside, apparently I had enhanced memory. So, sure, I could take my power and go Carrie on Winslow, or even conquer the world, but I rejected the casualties that would cause. I'd put together a Laser Pistol and a Hostile Environment Suit, then demanded some armour plates to protect myself, but now I had to think on what to do next.

This improvised armour I was making just in case would look a lot prettier if it was in UEF grey and blue or Aeon white and green, but my caution was too strong for stuff like that to matter to me. There was a problem though, as one of my Primary Objectives practically screamed at me: KEEP THE COMMANDER SAFE. That would naturally mean I needed to claim a lot of open land to build up in at some point, because the Land and Air Factories demanded squares of land 160 meters on a side.

It was very nice indeed that I didn't need to start with absolutely nothing, because I strongly suspect engineering my way up to being able to even build a Tier -3 unit would take me several months. Alternatively, I could easily be like a caveman trying to reverse-engineer a modern laptop computer, and completely fail.

 _Let's begin…_

Now, while I'm busy building my first Tier -3 Resource Generator, you might be wondering how I figured out one unit of Mass was two tons and thus could translate the Megalith's 33750 Mass to 67500 tons of walking, four-legged destruction.

When I picked up the Handheld Assembler and focused my attention on it, trying to discover its properties, I'd found that it had a mass of 1 kilogram. This had been given in my personal build menu (which I discovered when I found I could select myself when zoomed out, as I accidentally did while waiting for the assembler to build) as 0.0005 of the green stuff. Since the other orange-coloured resource was pretty obviously energy, I presumed that the green icon was Mass for now (this turned out to be correct). Given it had been about a quarter of my Mass bar, well, I figured out I could hold four kilograms of stored Mass in my body.

Lo and behold, the blur on the full end of my Mass storage bar resolved itself as "4 kg". That proved the idea that the green resource was Mass, because my interface wouldn't confirm wrong hypotheses. The energy units weren't in any unit I was familiar with, so it just resolved itself as a number when I knew how much my bar was thanks to the cost of the assembler. After harvesting some more garbage for mass and energy, I started building my first Tier -3 Resource Generator.

I'll slow down and contemplate what I was going to do with all my power once I reached Tier -1 and started fielding security bots, thanks.

* * *

 **A/N** : I refuse to nerf SupCom so badly it might as well be a bash fic. The initial build WILL be fast. What to DO with the power, on the other hand… Uh… hmm…


	4. Today Brockton, Tomorrow NOT the World

A/N: Tribute to Stewart92's "A Skittering Heart" in this short chapter ( **We will enter the cape scene next chapter** ). God help Bakuda if she uses anything bigger than a firecracker in Taylor's Town where she can notice, because Cauldron won't (and wouldn't try anyhow).

Any SupCom cross that puts it in a shard is mildly nuts at least, since SupCom tech is easily powerful enough to not only survive the Entities but outright hunt down and exterminate them.

* * *

Chapter 3: Today Brockton, Tomorrow NOT the World

 _Worm (Web Novel) Earth, Local Date Thursday, January 6, 2011_

 **Primary Objective Achieved! New Primary Objective: Reach Tier -1**

I'd have to explain to Dad why our basement is full of tinker tech when he comes home, I guess.

Because the von Neumann style exponential escalation this is capable of is utter insanity.

With this power, the problem isn't thinking large, it's thinking small. You can't shoot away poverty, or hunger, or hatred, or disease or any of those other things, and the civilian build options are locked until I have at least five hundred Tier 3 or higher units and structures. Where, pray tell, am I going to park five hundred possibly walking fortresses without the world finding out and having the shit scared out of them?

…Well, okay, technically you can shoot away poverty, hatred, disease, and so on. It's called No More Humans. No thanks, because that sounded too much like Sophia's spewed shit about predators and prey, as in glorified Nazism.

On the other hand, there were those who really needed to die so that everyone else can live. That was one of the first things humans learnt, to cooperate and exterminate stronger, tougher, faster predators. Cooperation to destroy threats and obtain resources was a founding stone of human civilization…

It was something that even my power had, with the cooperation of numerous units and structures to achieve a goal.

Right now, I needed more information before deciding what to do next. That meant building up until I at least had Tier -2 "Light Security Drones" (read: Terminator-looking robotic troops) and establishing a sensor grid around the town. I don't think building an actual base outside of the city could possibly be hidden from the satellites.

…Looking back later I would find that thought comically hilarious, but that just shows what I knew back then…

It had taken me under an hour to get up to a Tier -2 Resource Generator and a Tier -2 Backpack Assembler.

That, combined with the raw numbers I'd crunched in the meantime, had been very, very alarming. However, due to the sheer magnitude of what my power implied, my angst over the idea of killing people to help the world was more alarming, since it was basically a matter of "should I declare war on the current state of humanity or not?"

For example, when researching triggers just after I came home, I'd come across a Kingdom Hearts fanfic that had talked about a cape named Boiler with hydro-kinesis triggering after his home and family burnt down around him. In the story, when he'd found two teens setting urban development houses on fire for fun, he'd made one wheelchair-bound for life before his temper and water pressure began to let up. After that no hero team would touch him.

I sincerely hope the real cape scene is not nearly so retarded. Those shits got off too easy for what they were doing. My response would have been to set the brats on fire as an appropriate punitive action, with Panacea on hand to ensure they survived with a few good scars (not on the face or head, that tended to make grudges instead) to remember it by. At the very least, since they were doing it for "shits and giggles" or, depending on diction, "for kicks", I'd either pepper-spray the insides of their oral and anal cavities, or brand the soles of their feet with hot irons. I don't think any of them would take the other option, which was "for fun" and the corresponding use of fiery sensation (pepper spray) on their "fun" equipment.

If I had Boiler's fictional powers and I had kept them secret, I'd have given them major scald burns, probably burnt their dicks or noses (depending on availability of dicks) off, and then broken their backs by hydraulic pressure. Bullies that have been destroying people's lives and livelihoods are not entitled to lives, nor livelihoods, and if I thought I could get away with it, I would be karma's instrument. After all, you had to kill the cancer cells for the patient, namely society, to survive. Too bad modern society was so stupid that there were probably pro-cancer activists…

This sort of extreme hostility toward bullying and its bigger cousins, as in many forms of crime, could end up being used to justify myself acting like a bully. However, since I was wholly focused on commensurate retribution, it apparently didn't set off my internal bully radar. Back when it had been imaginings in my head about how I'd love to get back at the Three Bitches, and how I'd be a hero that made things better. It was harmless.

Now? I could probably assemble a world-conquering army within a day if I actually tried. Thus I needed to clamp down on my anti-bully tendencies. Wonderful…

 **New Overall Objective: Uplift Local Humans to Post-Scarcity Society. Associated Secondary Objective: Do Not Induce Collapse-of-Civilization Level Panic and Upheaval During Uplift to Post-Scarcity.**

Well, at least the boxes in my interface's upper right hand corner, despite both of these being filed away in a tab for overall objectives, were going to make sure I was reminded of those issues.

Now, while my assemblers are set to produce silver blocks, because they weren't very hazardous even compared to iron which tended to just sit there and rust, as a crude form of storing generated mass for the next hour, I need to go do some more research. My objective?

 **New Primary Objective: Discern Entry Level of Cape Scene, then Enter It WITHOUT Starting a Panic.**

Thanks, whatever's living in my head and giving me these notifications…

* * *

 **A/N** : Taylor hasn't figured out that Tier 0 on up start having "passive stealth" and "active camo" to the extent that you can't tell it's an Ythotha or Tier 1 unit, or a CZAR versus a Tier 1 air unit, until it comes in 1280m range of a Tier 3 Spy Plane, or about 400-500m for most land units e.g. "visual" range. The sensors can detect a 1m tall cactus falling over at LEAST 110-plus km away, _through the horizon_.

I don't believe in gameplay and story segregation. It also neatly explains why aerial units are so slow in-game (under Mach 2), because of STEALTH (fly too fast and the aerial shockwave is easy to see on sensors, lower speeds means some type of damping tech can handle it).


End file.
